‘Unlucky’ T’wolves come up short against Oak Grove combo team
East Mountain High School’s boys soccer team took its share of shots during its Oct. 12 home matchup against district rival Oak Grove / Menaul / Evangel Christian (OGMEC).
But only one of the Timberwolves’ shots found the back of the net, and the combination team from Albuquerque went home with a 4-1 victory.
“Other than not finishing, we played well, we just weren’t able to get the shots to go in,” East Mountain head coach John Larson said.
The visiting OGMEC Owls combination squad, classified on maxpreps.com as a “co-op”, is one of the top-5 teams in the state in Class 1A-3A, with a record of 12-3. The team is led by the state’s top scorer, Ben Sowers, who has netted more than 50 goals.
The T’wolves (5-12) mounted a couple of early attacks during the match, including one in the third minute that culminated with Jayden Mcdaniel firing a shot from about 15 yards out. The shot looked like it had a chance until the last second when it drifted wide by about a foot.
OGMEC scored its first goal in the 10th minute on a direct free kick that lofted over East Mountain’s wall of players and past T’wolves goalkeeper Chase Burke.
Sowers knocked in the next goal in the 27th minute for a 2-0 advantage.
Three minutes later, East Mountain’s Finn Macduffie took the ball into the left corner of the 18-yard box, rifled a beautiful cross pass to Tyler Burnette who punched it in to cut the margin to 2-1.
“We’ve worked on our crosses, and getting the crosses to freeze up the keeper, and that’s how we scored that one,” Larson said.
In the second half, the T’wolves continued to win a lot of possessions but they just couldn’t manage a goal— with three of their shots hitting the crossbar.
The Owls scored two more goals in the second half to seal the victory.
“We were really a bit unlucky,” Larson said. “We had opportunities, we just didn’t quite get all the balls in the goal that we should have.”
The loss came on the heels of two recent blowouts for the T’wolves, including a 17-0 rout on Oct. 9 over winless Gallup that ended at halftime on the mercy rule.
The matchup was supposed to be the second game of a boys-girls doubleheader. But Gallup didn’t bring enough players to field either team, so its girls joined the boys to play the T’wolves.
East Mountain’s Bodie Larson scored three goals—a hat trick—in the game’s opening minutes and the T’wolves led 5-0 by the fifth minute, so coach Larson replaced nearly all his starters with his JV players—and he also added the seniors from the Lady T’wolves’ squad, making for a rare coed game for both teams.
Four of the five Lady T’wolves that played in the game scored goals.